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Pop Goes the Weasel, like all of my books revealing the fascinating history behind much of our popular culture, presented me with the usual problem of content and how to weave seventy thousand words around a handful of well-known nursery rhymes without losing either the reader's (or my own)  interest. It is a useful rule of thumb (see Shaggy Dogs and Black Sheep to find out why we use that expression) for any writer, aspiring or otherwise, that if the words you have don't interest yourself when you have a read through at the end of the day, then it is fair to assume it won't interest anybody else either. So work on it some more or delete it. This is the reason it takes a writer all day to produce what can be read in ten minutes (one thousand words or 3 pages). Writing a book in real time, as Truman Capote once said, is not writing, it's typing, and that is worth remembering. But tomorrow I will reveal the process of writing and releasing a full length book in more detail. For now, it is back to Pop Goes the Weasel.

After discovering the wonderful real story of Humpty Dumpty I immediately started to outline an idea for a full book of history, hanging the stories on something we all immediately recognize: nursery rhymes. I felt that if I could find enough content then it would make a great book, but without dragging the text out for the sake of the word count. I felt that more than a thousand words on each subject would start to bore me, so what must that be like for you, dear reader? I wasn't going to put either of us through that so it meant I needed at least seventy rhymes. We ended up with over a hundred because some of the stories just didn't justify a thousand words so that wasn't a rule, it was only my guideline. There are no rules in book writing, apart from if it doesn't interest you yourself at the end of the day then...... well, you know the rest.